Cándido Camero, Conga Master Who Transformed Jazz, Dies at 99
“When you talk about percussion, particularly the evolution of
conga playing, you’re talking about two periods — before Cándido and after
Cándido,” the Grammy-nominated percussionist and bandleader Bobby Sanabria said
on Friday, having just attended a memorial service for Cándido Camero. “His
contributions were literally game changing.”
Mr. Camero — just Cándido to most fans and fellow musicians —
brought his Afro-Cuban musical influences to the United States from Cuba in the
middle of the last century and brought a new dimension to both Latin music and
jazz. He played multiple conga drums simultaneously, something new at the time,
and introduced other innovations as he performed with top names like Dizzy
Gillespie and Stan Kenton.
“More than any other Latin percussionist of his generation,
Cándido succeeded in making the sound of the conga drum a standard coloration
in straight-ahead jazz rhythm sections,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor
of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, who wrote
about Mr. Camero in “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), said by
email.
Mr. Sanabria, in an email interview, rattled off Mr. Camero’s list
of innovations.
“He developed coordinated independence as applied to the congas
and bongo — being able to keep a steady rhythm with one hand while soloing with
the other,” he said. “He was the first to develop the techniques to play
multiple percussion instruments simultaneously, sounding like three or four
players. He was the first to tune multiple congas to specific pitches so he
could play melodies on them, and he was an inventor as well. In 1950 he created
the first device for a player to be able to play a cowbell with one’s foot.”
Mr. Camero died on Nov. 7 at his home in New York. He was 99.
The National Endowment for the Arts, which designated Mr. Camero a
Jazz Master in 2008, posted
news of his death.
Cándido Camero was born on April 22, 1921, in Havana to Cándido
Camero and Caridad Guerra. His father worked at a factory that made soda
bottles, and his mother was a homemaker.
He said he began drumming when he was 4, pounding on empty
condensed milk cans, tutored by an uncle who played the bongos. He also learned
to play the tres, a Cuban stringed instrument, and the bass.
By 14 he was playing professionally. In an interview for the Smithsonian
Jazz Oral History Program in 1999, he described the precautions
his father took to keep him on the straight and narrow.
“As soon as I came home, my dad would say, ‘Say ha,’” he recalled.
“And I said, ‘Ha ha.’ And then he’d say: ‘Only one ha is needed. One is
enough.’ He wanted to smell my breath to see if I had been drinking.”
In the 1930s and ’40s he played one instrument or another in a
variety of groups, performing in nightclubs and street parades and on the
radio. For years he was part of the orchestra at the Tropicana nightclub in
Havana.
A job backing the dance duo Carmen and Rolando proved to be
pivotal. He had accompanied them in performances throughout Cuba when the act
was invited to the United States in 1946. In Cuba they had performed with two
percussionists, one of whom played bongos while Mr. Camero played the quinto, a
higher-pitched drum than the standard conga. The travel budget, though, allowed
for only one percussionist; they took Mr. Camero. And he introduced a new
flourish.
“I said, ‘OK, I’m going to try something to see if you like it and
if it works,’” he recalled in the oral history. “And they said, ‘What is it?’ I
say, ‘Well, I’m going to surprise you.’ Then I brought the conga and a quinto.
At showtime, I began to play the rhythm with my left hand on the conga and to
do what the bongo player was supposed to do with my right hand on the quinto to
mark the steps when they were dancing. That was the first idea, the low drum
and the quinto at the same time.”
By 1952 he was playing three congas at once and tuning them in
such a way that he could carry a melody. When he would solo with Kenton’s
orchestra in the mid-1950s, he added adornments that made him a virtual one-man
band.
“I used the conga, bass drum and hi-hat to carry the rhythm by
myself instead of the drum set,” he explained, “accompanying myself
rhythmically at the same time that I took my conga solo.”
He adapted these dazzling techniques to a range of bandleaders and
musical styles, and in turn he influenced those styles.
“To me,” Professor Fernandez said, “his greatest contribution was
establishing the conga drum as an integral, if not essential, component of the
modern straight-ahead jazz percussion scheme and securing a place for the
‘Latin tinge’ among the many rhythmic tinges available to the modern jazz
drummer.”
His versatility landed him on countless recording sessions.
“His complete list of recordings as a sideman is awesome,”
Professor Fernandez said. “More than 100 credits — Woody Herman, Art Blakey,
Ray Charles, Kenny Burrell, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Count Basie.” He also
recorded numerous albums as a leader.
At a 1999 performance at Birdland in Manhattan at which Mr.
Sanabria was leading one of his large ensembles, he brought out Mr. Camero for
a guest appearance. Peter Watrous, reviewing
the performance in The New York Times, made it sound as if Mr. Camero
stole the show.
“Mr. Camero has access to the divine,” he wrote, “and when he
began to play, the music changed. He uses several tuned conga drums, and he
began by playing melodies carefully. His playing makes sense, it has cadences,
and it starts and finishes logically. And he swings.”
Mr. Camero was still performing in his mid-90s. Information on his
survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Sanabria summed up Mr. Camero’s career succinctly.
“Every percussionist working today, in any context, owes a debt of
gratitude to him,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment